"Jobs and Events are the primary Upstart concepts," writes James Hunt Ubuntu Upstart maintainer at Canonical. "The version of Upstart provided with UbuntuNatty provides a new “initctl” command “show-config” which when coupled with a new tool “initctl2dot” allows these interactions to be understood visually."

initctl2dot showing gdm job

initctl2dot output showing gdm, plymouth and mountall jobs

In this post today, Hunt explains the new “initctl show-config” command as well as the "initctl2dot" command and show in a series of visualization graphs how the typical Ubuntu system starts.

Hunt uses his blog to explain to users what Upstart really means and highlights a few new commands. In his series of posts on Upstart Hunt shows that new with the Ubuntu Natty cycle is a focus on documenting the mysteries of Upstart.